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8 603Diversity.com | October 2021
n 1969 Warner, little Rebecca Carroll was the only Black resident. Adopted into a white family, living in a rural town of 1,400 people in the middle of a “lily-white” state, Carroll’s first encounter with another Black person was not until the age of 6, when her mother sent her to a ballet class, in part, because the teacher was Black. “I studied ballet with Mrs. Rowland for five years, and often in her company, I felt small pangs of fragile awareness regarding who I might be, what my skin color might mean,” Carroll writes in her 2021 memoir, “Surviving the White Gaze.” The book follows Carroll’s journey to form her racial identity, from those early years of wondering whether the few Black people she’d met or seen on TV possibly knew each other or were related, to her adolescent confusion at being attracted to a Black boy in a dance troupe but hiding it from her white friends and their “popular clique,” to a tumultuous relationship with her white birth mother who tried to dictate the terms of her Blackness and disparaged her Black birth father. Carroll writes beautifully in a book that is hard to put down, as she shows us, incident by painful incident, the racist experiences that change her, that each make her “body shiver as a small cell of trauma began to metastasize.” The teacher who tells her, while she’s in fifth grade, that most Black girls are ugly. The white classmates and boyfriends and friends who do not confront their racist families,
Rebecca Carroll’s “Surviving the White Gaze” is a memoir chronicling her experience as the only Black person in her rural New Hampshire community. It follows her journey as she struggles to form a racial identity while navigating difficult relationships and situations arising from her adoption into a white family.
